Happy Anniversary Pirates of the Burning Sea!

It’s been seven years since the launch of Pirates of the Burning Sea and we’re happy to say that we’re looking forward to the next year and hopefully many more anniversaries to come!For most of us here at Portalus Games this will be our fifth year with Pirates of the Burning Sea and entering our third year of operation as Portalus Games.We realize that many of our players have been with the game even longer than we have and we hope they are looking forward to the future of the game as much as we are.

Seven years of operation is a tribute to the game’s player base and I want to say thank you to everyone reading this and to many others who probably are not for the support you all have given to the game over the past 7 years.This is especially true over the last two years with Pirates of the Burning Sea and Portalus Games.This game and company could not have continued without the dedicated and passionate support of its players.It is to you all that the game owes its longevity and we want you all to know we are aware of that and we are above all grateful for your support.

When it comes to discussing the future I’d like to say that we can lay out a detailed plan for the upcoming year but at the moment we’re still working on formulating that while we finish up some end of the year business and assess what we feel might be some realistic goals to set for the next few months.We know what goals we would like to accomplish but we know more so this year than any other that we are going to need to be flexible with our plans and that we might not be able to set time tables to certain tasks until certain other tasks are accomplished first.That reality has us a bit reluctant to talk about long term plans at this time so for the moment we will focus on immediate development.

This year is going to bring some challenges as we know we will need to address several issues that have little to do with game play but are critical to keeping the game operating.Our servers while still reliable are aging and should be replaced sometime in the near future.We still need to restore web service operations such as restoration of the Burning Sea forum, user content and we’d like to restore a subscription service similar to the former Captain’s Club.Rebuilding these services and expanding the game’s presence through them will require us partnering with other service providers.More partners means more time spent in business operation rather than development and working with their schedules but ultimately to accomplish our goal of making the game more accessible to a larger audience these are necessary steps and we will have to fit what development we can in where ever we can until some of these goals are reached.

Our immediate plans regarding game development currently are focused on fixing bugs, addressing tuning issues and progressing with implementing the loot economy items that were originally slotted to be part of the 2.15 build.In the next few days we’ll push a build to the Test server that repairs the Mahogany log stack size bug, adjusts numerous NPC buy/sell price points and implements some construction cost adjustments that target lowering costs for cannon carriages, cannon barrels and basic ship hulls.We’ll follow that build with another that bring some reduction in labor values to several recipes, make some adjustments to ship accuracy mods and the start of the loot table overhaul that was originally to be part of the 2.15 build.Hopefully before these tasks can be accomplished we will have the forum operational again and will have a better format for discussion regarding future development in greater detail.